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Beware of mob justice in the age of social media

By Scott Thompson

Tues., Oct. 11, 2016

The most recent incident regarding the tossed beer can at the Blue Jays game may seem like just another instance of foolishness (on many people’s part), but it is more significant than that. It points to a developing trend where the lines are becoming blurred between surveillance, social media, and law enforcement.

We are seeing that social media has enabled a new capacity to crowd source public identification, to impose the judgment of guilt, and to apply punishments of specific and general deterrence — that is, punishments that work to hurt the individual, as well as those that work to ensure the general public sees the punishment of the individual and chooses not to do that same thing in the future.

Online sleuths were tweeting their ideas about the identity of the beer thrower at the Toronto Blue Jays wild-card game. "What is extremely problematic here is that our system of justice in Canada was designed to avoid mob justice, it was designed to ensure that any individual would be brought before an impartial court and given the presumption of innocence before any trial was to begin," writes Scott Thompson. (TWITTER)

In the past, these functions of collecting evidence, of passing judgment and applying sentences were understood as being the exclusive purview of impartial professionals within the Canadian criminal justice system.

Throwing cans of beer, or anything else for that matter, at sporting events is of course wrong, and even more concerning are the allegations of public displays of racism by some individuals at the ballpark.

It is difficult to fault anyone for wanting to take action against whoever may have done this, or question their desire to reiterate in no uncertain terms that these actions do not have a place within our community.

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It is also difficult to fault the Toronto Police service for releasing a photo of an individual they wanted to question, since calling on the aid of the general public to identify individuals in this way has historically been an effective tool for police work, while the very public nature of this case has put additional pressures to solve this case quickly.

What is extremely problematic here is that our system of justice in Canada was designed to avoid mob justice, it was designed to ensure that any individual would be brought before an impartial court and given the presumption of innocence before any trial was to begin. We have decided culturally that fair trials and strict adherence to rules about evidence collection and testimony are the ways that justice is best served.

By social media taking on these functions of judge, jury, and sentencing, we not only leave ourselves open to having our lives ruined by being misidentified as a perpetrator — as very well may be the case with the person currently identified and accused through social media. We also put at risk our shared cultural understandings around how justice should be done, an understanding that has been with us since Cesare Beccaria fought for law to be fair and evenly applied in the 18th century.

If the individual identified is in fact innocent, this would not be the first instance where social media has come to the conclusion that a certain person was guilty of a crime and dispensed its vengeance, only to later find that individual had nothing to do with it.

This happened very publicly to Sunil Tripathi (a student who had gone missing and who had passed away), who was accused by Reddit users of carrying out the bombings at the Boston Marathon in April of 2013, and it has had detrimental and lasting effects on his memory and the lives of his family.

The Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver in 2011 saw similar social media responses of outrage and identification. In that case the Vancouver Police Service also called on the general public to identify and build cases against people photographed and caught on video, ultimately resulting in nearly 300 people being charged and brought through the court system. These incidents will certainly not be the last we see of social media stepping into law enforcement.

Moving forward it is obviously well past time we stop throwing things at public events and take a stand against racist comments, but it is also a critical time to look into policies and legislation that will work to ensure the fundamental rights, upon which the criminal justice system is based, are not eroded by this new trend of social media crowdsourced evidence gathering.

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Dr. Scott Thompson is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow with the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University. His research focuses on the relationship between classification, governance and surveillance technologies.

Clarification - October 15, 2016: This article was edited from a previous version to make clear that Sunil Tripathi passed away in 2013.

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